Principal Engineer in Cardiff, London

This is a hybrid position within the UK. We currently don’t provide visa sponsorship.

We are a B2B Fintech focusing on disrupting the small business lending market. SMEs make up 99% of all UK businesses yet are traditionally underserved by big banks and financial institutions.

Built from nearly a decade of experience powering a digital credit broking marketplace, our SaaS solutions serve banks, lenders, and the wider SME finance ecosystem. Leveraging live, validated transactional data from the UK’s advanced data environment, FXE Technologies' products drive accurate decisioning and proactive engagement. Our products are used by over 80 leading high street and challenger banks and specialist lenders.

Role Description

We're looking for an ambitious, product-focused Principal Engineer, someone to act as trusted technical authority within the organisation, helping guide technical direction and act as a hands-on mentor and coach for other engineers alongside engaging with senior internal and external stakeholders on key strategic subjects.

You will be working across a handful of product engineering teams, composed of backend, frontend and test disciplines, fostering a culture of intellectual curiosity, engineering excellence and continuous improvement to uncover the best path forward.

You should enjoy and excel at interacting with both senior stakeholders and our product teams to collaborate in building out new solutions for our customers, pragmatically transforming product needs and dealing with ambiguity to create commercially valuable, flexible and extensible architectural solutions. You should be able to work alongside teams, deploying your experience and technical skillset to make these solutions a reality.

What you will be doing

• Identifying the right problems to solve, focusing on commercial value, pragmatic and meaningful outcomes, using your experience to make trade-offs that have the highest impact for customers.
• Engaging with future and existing customers and partners to gather the right information to build and then communicate better understanding for the problems we need to be solving.
• Own the exploration and documentation of strategy through engagement with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.
• Designing and building robust platform functionality, including developer-friendly APIs, domain and data modelling and integrations.
• Setting a high bar for collaboration, communication, and sound decision making.
• Leading architecture discussions, being the voice of experience helping the team balance flexibility, expediency and scalability, focusing on making it work, then making it beautiful, promoting experimentation by reducing the cost of failure, being an advocate of evidence-based decision making and obsessing about the customer.
• Collaborating closely with Product Managers and Engineers to explore and optimise potential solutions collaboratively.
• Helping grow the teams by aiding recruiting efforts for hiring engineers as we expand.

Who you will be

• You have a solid technical background with experience designing and large-scale engineering systems.
• You have at least 2 years contiguously working as a Principal Engineer, Architect or equivalent.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and are adept at working with stakeholders across a range of technical and non-technical disciplines.
• You possess a deep understanding of translating product and business goals into great tech.
• You have experience across the stack with technologies such as:
• Coding languages like Java, Javascript, Kotlin
• SQL and NoSQL Databases e.g. Postgres and MongoDB
• Cloud platforms like AWS
• Knowledge of common development frameworks and tools, e.g. React, Spring, Temporal
• Nice to have: Data Engineering / ML Experience.
• You are at the forefront of development practices like TDD, CI, CD and know where and how it's appropriate to apply each of them.
• You have several years of experience as a technical leader, working hands-on in an agile environment and contributing to strategy development and complex technical roadmaps.
• You will ideally have experience with SaaS in the FinTech industry and appreciate the associated data management and governance considerations.
• You have experience identifying cross-cutting problems, proposing solutions, and driving adoption of those solutions across teams with their priorities.
• You care deeply about mentoring and growing engineers, and senior engineers feel that they have lots to learn from you.
• You bring excellent written and verbal communication skills and a bias toward open, transparent cultural practices.
• You care deeply about user experience and have a strong interest in product and infrastructure design.

Benefits

• The business has offices in Shoreditch, London and the person will be able to work from there or remotely, with an expectation of being able to attend meetings in London either at our offices or with our clients a few times a month.
• Flexible working.
• Employee assistance and wellbeing support.
• Auto-enrolment in the pension scheme with contributions from FXE.
• Virtual GP.
• 25 days annual leave PLUS UK Bank Holidays.
• Life Assurance – 4 x your base salary should the worst happen.
• Talent Referral Scheme.
• Will writing service.
• Discounts with selected partners such as ASOS, Amazon, Tesco and more.
• Regular socials and team get-togethers.

FXE is an equal opportunities employer, and all positions are open to all suitably qualified candidates, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.